Algorithmic attention extraction monetizes love and the need for love.

Evidence

But it is essential to think otherwise. Because that way of thinking is literally killing people. It is delivering us to the algorithms, which press a sickly trickle of cash money out of our actual lives (to flow into the bank accounts of greedy profiteers). They press the money out of our eyes. Out of our friends. Out of what we love. Worse, out of our need for love—and out of our ability to love. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 205

Categorization

• APHORISMS: Worth sitting with: frames the deepest stake of attention extraction as not time or productivity but the extraction of love itself — the need for love and capacity to love.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that extraction reaches into our need for love — not merely our eyes and time — is the chapter’s paradigm-level sting. It redefines the harm from resource-loss to something like soul-extraction, worth long reflection.
• XREF: Echoes Adorno’s culture-industry claim that engineered pleasure returns subjects to resigned drudgery, and Marcuse’s argument that commodified satisfaction diverts eros — connections to the Frankfurt School critique of cultural extraction. — connects to: Dating apps monetize access to an imagined unlimited partner market — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 343